For women, what happens online is not virtual

One legacy of the sexualised trolling of Carlton footballer Tayla Harris is that a line was drawn by a shocked community: such vile misogyny online is intolerable.

Another is the understanding that for women – the main targets of gendered abuse – any remnants of a safety barrier between online and "real life" have gone; as far as potential impact is concerned, it's all the same thing.

Carlton's Tayla Harris was correct when she said what happened to her online amounts to sexual assault.Credit:Justin McManus

After the Harris trolling-backlash, sexists looking for women to victimise were put on notice that they are being watched, which is great.

But ordinary online users had a stark reminder, too: that we need to be on guard for tangible harms to which we may be exposed in a place we once considered somehow slightly removed.

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Unless you are a celebrity, media or TV personality very actively engaged online, you may have until relatively recently assumed the kind of actual damage Harris deemed "sexual assault" could never happen to you; your online "life" could be comfortably (enough) segregated, or insulated from the real life around you on the TV-room couch.

But, as Harris' accurate assessment that she had been exposed to assault attests, there is harm here because of the nature of the abuse. What has changed is the abuse is being dished out by people who were in no way aware they were saying, doing or participating in something that could cause them to be singled out for it.

As cyber-culture experts attest, for women using whatever public forum (and given 88 per cent of Australians are now online, with 72 per cent also active on social media according to the February 2019, We Are Social global internet report there are millions of us) there's a chance if someone disagrees with you they will go directly to vicious, gendered attacks, the likes of which you may never have faced.

The effects are very much real, says UNSW gender, culture and communications specialist, Dr Emma Jane.

"Much of the focus has been on (online) hate speech related to race or culture, but my focus has been on gendered hate speech, and what I see is it has become normalised to the point where if you disagree with someone, and you don't like what she's doing, the normalised next step is to go straight to the rape threat, or the 'fat, ugly slut'.

People are attempting to out-do each other with how over the top their hateful, gendered speech can be.

"That kind of abuse has become the normal way of disagreeing (with women) online."

There is even "a sense of competitiveness about it", she says. "It's everywhere; people are attempting to out-do each other with how over the top their hateful, gendered speech can be ... the idea it's just a game, it's humour, lighten up – there's a kind of competitive game-ification of abuse."

In the "olden days" of the internet, everyday folks who did not frequent the online underbelly would not have had to come into contact with such horrendous reality; now, this stuff is standard, if potentially shattering, fare.

"Re the harms of online hate speech, you shouldn't make a division between online and offline. What happens online is not virtual; it's not something we can say, 'It's not real,'" says Dr Jane.

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"We need to put that idea to the side. We don't do things 'online' anymore, we just do things. The online world is fully integrated. So stop making distinctions such as, 'If it's online it's less harmful than things that happened offline.'"

Jane interviewed 50 Australian women who had been targeted with potentially devastating abuse, two thirds of them "ordinary citizens" and a third "high profile". "I don't think there was any one of them who wasn't quite severely affected by it at some point," she says.

"Everyone I spoke to was extraordinarily resilient, and would put up with hundreds, maybe thousands of these types of communications and keep going online. But I noticed if they were having a really, really bad day, one can really get to you. You just reach breaking point."

Melbourne University culture and gender lecturer, Dr Lauren Rosewarne, says though "those women who participate in activities historically understood as 'men's domain' (sport, politics, comedy etc) are very familiar with ... appearance based slurs, slut-shaming or threats of sexual violence" as "the basis" of online attacks on women, their impact can be much worse for "ordinary citizens".

Such attacks can feel not only very personal but impact on self-esteem and self-worth.

"Such attacks can feel not only very personal but impact on self-esteem and self-worth."

"That said, I don't know how we go about 'arming' people, nor do I necessarily think teaching them forbearance in this space desirable – I would rather see the platforms themselves take a more pro-active approach to clamping down on this kind of behaviour altogether."

One interesting statistic in We Are Social Australia's 2019 Digital Report was that Australians have stopped increasing their daily time online year-on-year, and have begun to cut it back (from 5.5 hours a day in 2018 to a little over five hours in 2019 data). Even so, Dr Rosewarne cautions that our online and offline lives are more homogeneous than ever.

"Many of us are online for the duration of our waking hours. With this in mind, the breakdown between a 'real self' and a 'cyber self' in quickly fading: we've – in essence – become what all those 1990s sci-fi films feared – a kind of human/computer hybrid."

Until platforms take more responsibility for policing dangerous members of the communities they host, one trick for all of us who do not relish online blood sport could be to to learn how to identify approaching shadows and keep out of their reach.

But, why should we limit our own freedoms because platforms mining our lives for advertising dollars fail in their duty of care?

As women's sport advocate, Danielle Warby, remarked last week, it should absolutely not be "on us" to have to fight for own right to basic online/offline safety.